I’m going to revive here a thing I was doing a while ago on Tumblr. It’s called “Book Descriptions I Didn’t Finish Reading,” and it’s primarily for my amusement, but you are all welcome to enjoy.
Also, I think we will be reviving The Coffee Thing sometime in the next month or so. Watch This Space. Well, not literally this space. This space won’t be changing very much.
Somebody posted something recently in one of my feeds about the new Avengers movie, and I guess they must have been posting from a phone, because they referred to “age of lutein.” It turns out lutein is a real thing (which I guess is why someone’s autocorrect would use it); it’s a yellow pigment found in plant leaves and egg yolks. THIS IS HOW TRIVIA HAPPENS, PEOPLE.
Anyway, I am going to see Avengers: Age of Lutein tomorrow evening with the Boy, the Girl, and one of the Boy’s friends. Mrs. Someone can’t make it, so that means some subset of us will undoubtedly be seeing it again sometime fairly soon. I’m looking forward to it. The Boy and I watch Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and we enjoy seeing how the movies are tied into the TV show (or is it vice versa)?
In Dead Tree news, I just finished reading The Three Musketeers (Gutenberg Project link). I’ve seen the movie–and as far as I’m concerned, there is only one “The Movie” when it comes to this work: the 1973 Richard Lester version, starring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, and Raquel Welch–but I had never before read the book. The movie tells only the first half of the story; I never saw the sequel (The Four Musketeers), which tells the second half.
The book is a great deal of fun. The language is pretty florid, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the result of mid-19th century literary sensibilities or Alexandre Dumas’s tribute to earlier times (with a wink to the reader). Overall, the book is quite funny (though fairly gruesome in parts). The religious and political setting is one with which I am entirely unfamiliar, so it has spurred me to further reading. I would like to read Dumas’s follow-ups, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.
But that will have to wait, as I am now on to Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Acillary Justice (about which I wrote last week). I just started, so I have little to say about it, other than that I really like the way Ann Leckie evokes the cultural and religious background in which the story is set.
I recently read Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
The story takes place in a universe dominated by a religious empire (the Radch) that has expanded aggressively, using (among other things) sentient starships which interact with their human commanders through human bodies called ancillaries. The narrator, Breq, is a former ancillary from a particular echelon of ancillaries of the warship Justice of Toren, platoon of its ancillaries, but is now a single individual. Breq’s sole goal now is to exact revenge against the person who effectively destroyed her as a ship and left only the one ancillary.
The story itself is a little slow to get rolling, but ultimately becomes a compelling space opera, weaving together Breq’s current journey with the slow reveal of what happened to the Justice of Toren. What I (and many reviewers) find so fascinating about the book, though, is that the Radch empire uses a language (which presumably reflects a culture) that does not mark gender. Breq and the other Radchaai characters refer to everybody using feminine pronouns–“she,” “her”–even while describing or otherwise indicating that particular individuals are male. Thus, on a planet outside the empire, whose native language does recognize gender differences, Breq will listen for cues from natives as to whether a particular person is male or female, while Breq’s internal narration consistently uses only feminine pronouns.
At first, this was a little odd. In the beginning, the use of “her” and “she” in conjunction with a description of a character as “probably male” (Breq’s not very certain all the time) jars one out of the story a bit. About 50 pages in, though, it struck me that gender didn’t matter. Whether a given character had male or female genitalia, or whether they identified as one gender or another, was entirely irrelevant to the story, because (a) most of the action didn’t have anything to do with sex, romance, love, or anything that might implicate gender or gender roles; and (b) even in those few instances where relationships were relevant, the gender(s) of the participants were not.
I think that when we read a book, we look for cues in the text to help us develop an internal image of the characters, and that’s why the use of non-gender in this book was a bit jarring. But when it finally clicked for me, I realized that my internal visual image of the characters was irrelevant to the story and to my enjoyment thereof. The use of feminine pronouns dispelled the “default” maleness for characters whose sex is not specified (because–again–it doesn’t matter).
I am sure there are people who think the genderless approach is a gimmick, or who will bristle at not knowing exactly which equipment a particular character is sporting between their legs (or who will be offended at the idea that a male-sexed character–whose maleness might be cued in the text–would be referred to as “she”). Some might think it distracts and detracts from the storytelling. In a lesser story, maybe any of that distraction would have been a negative; but for me at least, the transition from catching myself constantly wondering and adjusting my internal image of the characters to realizing that I knew exactly what was going on and it didn’t matter whether a particular character was a man or a woman or something else added a cool dimension to the whole experience. I’m looking forward to reading the next two books. (Because isn’t everything at least a trilogy these days? Ancillary Sword is already out, and Ancillary Mercy is coming this year.)
Someone's Got To Say It 